That the White House would hold an event in which the president complained about an “invasion” crossing the border with Mexico the day after a white supremacist in New Zealand killed 49 dark-skinned Muslims is an exceptionalexample of tone-deafness. The language and imagery of an “invasion” by dark-skinned people underlies the ideology of white supremacy expressed by the New Zealand shooter, the American who killed eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue last year, Dylan Roof in South Carolina in 2015, and countless other terrorist acts carried out since Trump took office. Trump using it on any day is horrific, but using it less than 24 hours after the New Zealand massacre is as blatant an indication of just where his sympathies lie as one can imagine.

Just to drive the point home, here is Trump’s response when asked about whether there is a growing threat of white supremacist terrorism:

Required implicitly by his position as the leader of the world’s multi-ethnic, pluralistic democracies to denounce the sort of racism and xenophobia on murderous display in New Zealand, the president of the United States instead repeated it from his desk in the Oval Office. It would be incredible if it wasn’t so awful.